Revisiting Israel’s Mixed Cities Trope

This article offers a critical examination of the term mixed cities, concentrating mainly on its usage in Zionist and Israeli discourse. It posits that the term is uniquely reserved to denote Israel’s Jewish Arab urban spaces. Presented as bureaucratic and value-free, the term sharply contrasts with the anti-Arab reality of Israel’s mixed cities. The article traces the origin of the term to pre-State, Zionist discourse, which denounced Arab Jewish “mixing,” situating it between “pure” Zionist and “foreign” Palestinian Arab spaces. The article identifies four general forms of urban (anti-)mixing: pluralistic, racial, sovereign, and colonial. It locates Israel’s mixed cities within the latter two categories. Abandoning this ideologically charged trope and replacing it with Urban Studies concepts are proposed. The advantages of this perspective are demonstrated with a test-case analysis of Arab-Jewish cities in British Palestine (1918-1948) through the lens of Scott Bollens’s model for the study of ethno-national contested cities.

My Enemy, My Neighbour: Characteristics and Challenges of Arabic Instruction in Israeli-Jewish Society

This article examines Arabic instruction in Israeli Hebrew schools with regard to the political, social, cultural, historical and pedagogical issues shaping it. It examines challenges facing Arabic instruction in Israel's education system, emphasising the dissonance between potential benefits of studying Arabic and its overall marginalised status in Israel. This article argues that that the main factors shaping Arabic instruction in Israeli-Jewish schools since 1948 are official security considerations and security claims — Arabic is studied as the language of the enemy and not the neighbour. A radical policy shift is required to ‘civilianise’ and demilitarise Arabic instruction and transform it into a bridge for understanding between Israeli-Jews, Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, in particular, the Palestinians, in general, as well as Israel's Arab neighbours in the Middle East.

Multiculturalism as Reflected in the Linguistic and Semiotic Landscape of Arab Museums in Israel

Multiculturalism is respectful of diversity among individuals and communities in a society, allowing them to retain and express their particular identities and engage in egalitarian dialogue. This article examines how the multiculturalist approach is reflected in the linguistic and semiotic landscape of Arab museums in Israel. It focuses on a case study of the Umm al-Fahm Art Gallery as a window onto the sociocultural realities of Israel. The article’s findings are based on an analysis of the linguistic and semiotic landscape elements of the museum space and a semi-structured in-depth interview with its founder. They attest to deficiencies in the process of retaining and designing the particular cultural elements for the Palestinian-Arab population in Israel, affecting the realization of multiculturalism and compromising egalitarian dialogue between the various communities.

Hierarchical Inclusion: The Untold History of Israel's Affirmative Action for Arab Citizens (1948–68)

The history of Israel's relationship with its Palestinian-Arab minority during the founding decades, from 1948 to 1968, is often portrayed as a story of formal citizenship that concealed large-scale, state-sanctioned oppression under military rule. This article excavates an untold history of employment affirmative action for Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel during these two decades which does not fit neatly into this story. Drawing on original archival research, it reveals that, during Israel's founding decades, officials adopted hiring quotas for unskilled Arab workers and for educated Arabs; requirements and incentives for hiring Arabs in government offices, Jewish businesses, and organizations; earmarked jobs and established vocational training courses for the Arab population. It demonstrates that interests in safeguarding Jewish control and economic stability aligned with egalitarian aspirations, and motivated state officials to adopt measures that promoted the inclusion of the Arab population in the workforce, albeit on unequal terms. Furthermore, these measures were part of a transformation of the state's attitude towards Arab citizens, from strict military control to a regime of “hierarchical inclusion” entailing gradual integration into the Israeli economy — mostly though its lower tiers and with a second-class status. Tracing the use of these mechanisms, not then called affirmative action but recognizable as such today, to this period of subjected population management, complicates our understanding of both this chapter in Israel's history and of affirmative action more broadly.